@Thot I can confirm you can use ROS Jade on Raspberry Pi 3; although it takes some time.
I’ve deployed it on Raspbian Jessie - make sure you get the newest distribution from the raspberrypi.org. After the introduction of the WiFi and the Bluetooth there were some teething problems and I have had inconsistent operation of the builtin WiFi in RPi 3. With the last one it seems to be fine. The Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS also can be installed but many of the depending packages for ROS (ex. PCL, eigen, etc.) are not yet available as binary installs and it would be tedious to install all from source. You should also use a minimum 16GB SD card - as fast as you can get.
Once you have the system ready and running (expanded the boot disk, updated the system, etc.) you can start installing ROS Jade from source. Before doing that you will need to increase your swap file to 1GB (1024) because some of the compiling (ex. roscpp) will need aprox 1.7GB memory and your Pi will simply crash.
You can do that by modifying the dphys-swapfile
sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile
And change the line
CONF_SWAPSIZE=100
into
CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024
Next you can either restart your PI or just the swap daemon:
sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile stop
sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile start
The second instruction will take bout 30 seconds to run (it creates the swap file) so don’t be alarmed if the prompt doesn’t return immediately.
Usefree -m
to make sure that you have 1024 of swap memory.
Now you can start installing the ROS stack using the instructions from the ROS site. You can use the Ubuntu guidelines.
One suggestion: at point 2.1.1 there are 3 options in the instructions. I recommend you to use none of them, but instead use the robot
variant. I have installed the desktop
one which took significantly longer - but worked - but this one installs tools like rvis
that really don’t make sense to run on a Pi. robot
should install faster and should provide you all the packages needed. So use these commands for section 2.1.1 instead:
$ rosinstall_generator robot --rosdistro jade --deps --wet-only --tar > jade-robot-wet.rosinstall
$ stool init -j8 src jade-robot-wet.rosinstall
All in all it should take about 3 hours to have everything setup.
On the other hand because 16.04 is the LTS for Ubuntu and ROS had already a distribution for Raspberry (armhf) it is just a matter of time before they will release the binaries for it. Probably in about 2-3 months they should be available. Since there are dependencies on other packages those will need to be released first.